A prime commodity of the information society in which we live is timely, cost effective and accurate data analysis. However, research is currently produced in prodigious quantities in almost all fields of study, including but not limited to, finance, medicine, engineering, social sciences and government and therefore the goal of timely, cost effective and accurate data analysis is becoming persistently more difficult to achieve due to a analyst's limited resources to study all the available research data.
One of the principal reasons for the flood of research information is the efficiency of modern data processing tools such as word processing and spreadsheet programs, which allow a researcher to generate a highly detailed report in a matter of hours or days when it used to take days and weeks to produce the same report without modern data processing tools. Also, since data produced for prior reports is presently so easy to manipulate, research reports have been expanding in size because a current research report is an updated version of an older research report. As a result, large quantities of research data are generated that can obscure the data that is relevant to an analyst's particular research goal.
For example, an investor that owns a particular company's stock usually cannot wade through every detail of a lengthy 10-Q in order to discern the health of the company when the 10-Q is released because the stock will be moving due to others trading on the information as soon as it is released. As a result, economically sensitive news has an inherent time value characteristic for investors because economically sensitive news is more valuable to investors if it is acted on in real-time or near real-time versus any time delay in action. This inherent time value characteristic of economically sensitive news is the key component in understanding the importance of securities market timing.
Timing in the market is the ability to receive timely economically sensitive news, digest its impact on the security and react accordingly to the conclusions drawn from the impact analysis. Reaction time is important because the pool of competing investors will impound the value of the impact of the economically sensitive news very quickly into a security. The ideal would be for an investor to react instantaneously to economically sensitive news, but in real life an investor will have to settle for a close approximation of the ideal. Accordingly, any delay in reaction to a release of economically sensitive news will result in a less than ideal result for the slow investor.
Consequently, what is need is a system and method that will reduce the research work load by providing the securities information disclosure in different data formats thereby allowing a user to choose which format will provide the appropriate degree of disclosure for their needs. The system and method should also enable a user to easily navigate between data formats because different sections of each information disclosure may require different levels of scrutiny.